Follicular unit hair transplants are quickly becoming the standard these days. There are not that many hair transplant clinics left that don't use this technique anymore. What microscopic follicular unit transplanting means, is that hairs are exclusively transplanted in naturally occurring groups of 1, 2, 3 or 4 hairs. The hairs will be taken from the back of the head, where DHT resistant hair grows. This technique gives superior results over the techniques that were used back in the old days, when much larger groups of hairs were used in hair transplant sessions. The donor hair that is extracted can either be extracted in a strip or the hairs can be extracted individually.

When the hairs are extracted individually, we call this follicular unit extraction. Many people prefer this way of extracting follicles individually over the strip excision. The strip excision leaves a larger wound and almost always develops scar tissue that ends up being all itchy and irritated over the coming years. The individual extraction of follicles leaves lots of tiny wounds. This is much better, because the scar tissue you will be left with from all these tiny wounds, will be divided. A strip scar will form a dam, so to speak. A barrier through which blood vessels and nerves have a hard time penetrating during the healing process. The method of follicular unit extraction is considered to be much less invasive than strip extraction.

With the follicular unit hair transplant, the direction in which the hair naturally grows is mimicked. If your donor hairs are being transplanted by an expert, your results will look very natural and pleasing to the human eye. In many cases, your transplanted hair will look indistinguishable from your original hair.

Because the tiny grafts that are used in follicular unit transplants, the recipient wounds made on top of the scalp only need to be very small in size. This also greatly decreases the invasiveness of the whole procedure. Because the recipient wounds are only very small, the chances of them developing large amounts of scar tissue is very small. Because of this minimal damage to the skin's surface, the doctor can transplant thousands of grafts in a few hours time. These recipient sites are so small that they usually heal in a few days and don't leave any marks that can be seen with the naked eye.

Because this technique leaves the naturally occurring hair groups in the donor area intact, natural results are guaranteed. Back in the old days, donor hair was dissected in an unnatural way. Sometimes, a graft contained up to 12 hairs. The effects you would get from this would look all tufted and bulky. When these large grafts were used in the hairline, it would give you a 'doll hair' effect. This looked very unnatural and people generally weren't very pleased with the cosmetic results.

Thanks to the follicular unit transplant, the doll hair effect is a thing of the past. Don't ever get a hair transplant at a clinic that doesn't use the most modern technologies. For the price you pay for a hair transplant, you have the right to a good looking head of hair!